I love Wine fore all the things I got going but yes it is a bit to much like Windows if you use it for Explorer or constantly run games over the web like World of Warcraft.
I am not concerned about it running in the background because thats the updater not some Wine hacker playing the fiddle alone in your Linux system.
I will say that the only software that will do you any good without Fing up Wine maybe Hackthis.
If you are concerned about speed and Wine then I will recommend not to try the Wine NT kernel because you will be running that extra kernel every time you use Wine and yes it can be more easily hacked with the potential of screwing up more than a Wine virus ever could.
I hope this helps.

I have wine installed so I can play with it and I'm a newbie (learn what I can!) and also playing with ies4linux..... anyone have shockwave running??

but I also have Vbox setup with a small Windows server 2k3 installed to a 400mb vdi just to run basic programs that really don't work under wine.... shockwave and Yahoo! messenger.

I don't run this much as my puppy is a 4gig flash drive and to save the read and writes I'm using a 512mb thumbdrive to host my windows drive. so it works great for me. well whenever I "need" to use it.

For running only one or two programs, why would you want to load an entire OS in vmware? For example, I frequently run a financial management program that doesn't support linux, but works with wine perfectly; loads in seconds and runs as fast as in xp.

I suppose if I wanted to be a purist, I could avoid any hardware or software without linux support, but prefer the best of both worlds (I have a windoz PC for programs like quickbooks, transfer software for my sony reader, turbotax, etc...)

Edit: Regarding freeing up 1.88 gigs with a registry cleaner. On my machine, all the wine files together come to about 60mgs, so this doesn't make much sense. I'm doubtful that it needs to be "cleaned."
Unlike in windows, the registry file is very transparent. On my system,
it's a 36K file: ~/.wine/user.reg that you can click on and read with your editor.

The "you lose" bit has been attributed to Calvin Coolidge, at a dinner party some gregarious woman told him she'd made a bet that she could get him to say MORE than 2 words.
A similar story with Kipling: He was one of Great Britain's most popular and highly paid authors. It was reported that he received more per word than any other author of his day. Some university student as a joke sent him double that amount with a request for 2 of his best words. Kipling replied "Thank you".

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